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Why am I being suspended?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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No, quite the contrary: the fact that these instances are the most popular also makes them the biggest targets for automated sock puppet and bot account creation. These guys are even more paranoid than many smaller instances about user names that appear to be randomly generated. Your own user name, as others in this thread suggested, would easily trigger their auto-ban rules. And a human moderator would take one look at the name and think the same thing.
And it is possible these auto-ban rules are builtin to the Mastodon server reference implementation and enabled by default, meaning it is likely that all other Mastodon instances you might try to sign up for would also have these same auto-ban rules. I don't know for sure, but I am not willing to play around and find out. So it looks to me like your only choice is to choose a different username. Sorry.
God damnit, it took me until now to actually read their username. It's the youtube URL for the rickroll video (ending in XcQ). I think you're right though - it was obviously autogenerated originally and only took on its current meaning via Youtube's use of the string.
You quoted the appeal-part of my comment. I would understand if a bot is implemented to suspend users with usernames which is just a generated string of high entropy, like my own. But rejecting an appeal should not be an automated process.
I can't imagine that the automated ban helps a lot either. Generating random usernames which looks like real people's usernames is pretty much a trivial task. Using a high-entropy string is just a choice on the developers side.
My point is that a human can't tell the difference between a name generated by a bot and your username either. So you're right that the appeal ought not be automated, but regardless of whether it is or not, you are not likely to get an appeal. It will just go straight to ban, and a human in the loop would take a look at the name, see high entropy, and not wouldn't think twice about whether the automated ban was correct. Like I said, they are paranoid because they are the largest Mastodon instances, and they have had to deal with concerted bot attacks a few times already.
Sure, and I'd probably understand it from the instance owners perspective better if I were in their shoes. And to be fair to them, my username was randomly generated by youtube at some point. So if they just outright reject appeals from generated usernames, I definitely fall into that category. I just feel like that's a bad process and practice for instances which are among the top of the suggested list for new users.
Considering that some bots might also have automatic appeals integrated makes it more reasonable to expect that automated rejection.